OK, you've waited long enough. I don't know anyone who has ever ordered or received a bottle, and they do not have a picture of one on their site. I have written emails to Skyview to take it off their list, to no avail. The GAN EDEN brand and trademark is registered to me and not to anyone else at the federal level. The brand was never abandoned by me in the trade, it has been down under the requisite inactive period of time to ber considered abandoned. I have continued the active web site to the brand, and I am working on a bottling of GAN EDEN wines for sale before Pesach (2010 Cab, Syrah and Zin). I have never abandoned the name nor the business, and anyone using the name is in breach of my trademark. Skyview is using the brand name, at least on its web site, with a product which does not exist legitimately, if at all. Skyview will not be offered the new GAN EDEN, but many other wine shops in the area will be offered it. MY emails to Skyview have told them that failure to remove reference to GAN EDEN at this time would result in their being excluded from being offered legitimate GAN EDEN, and they seem unmoved. Thus, more for others. Frankly, I do not know what else I can do without engaging an attorney.

Gabe, the Agua Dulce and Gan Eden will be somewhat different wines in most cases. The GAN EDEN, as it stands now, will be a partnrship between me and the owner of Agua Dulce, and will intially be limited to wines I produced in past vintages for Agua Dulce, since I cannot crush anything now from past vintages, but will eventually include fruit purchased from other growers, from elsewhere in the state or the surrounding states. I do not now anticipate bottling more than half of the Agua Dulce production under the GAN EDEN label, though if allowed to, that could change. Therefore, my initial release will likely be around 800 cases (12 bottles each) split between the 3 varieties, with a later release of 2012 Chardonnay. That would be the smallest release for GAN EDEN ever, but beggars can't be choosers. I don't think I ever produced less than 3500 cases in a year when I had my own winery, and even that was only the 1985 vintage. Unfortunately, again, I cannot work with fruit I do not have, and especially not with wine I do not have. So I would imagine the first few vintages will not be long in inventory, and should easily sell out by Rosh Hashana unless I decline to do anything except direct sales. But I would like to begin a distribution system in which direct sales is only a large portion, in anticipation of the days I have 20,000 or more cases I need to sell.

Yossie, the problem is that I never made a 2010 vintage, which tells me it is not old stock, but rather counterfeit, if it existed at all. But I agree, chances are it is a phantom placed there for some purpose by the powers that be at Skyview. I wish I could understand the purpose, and why they are more interested in maintaining the fantasy wine than getting in real inventory. But in any case, they are out of luck.

Yehoshua, I think it's premature to say GAN EDEN Wine lives. Rather, it's still active in a legal sense, and we are close to the development of a new label or 3 for it. However, the wine has not yet been bottled.

Craig - from an IP perspective, it is hard to argue that you have not taken steps to enforce your rights in the mark - an important step for all brand owners to avoid arguments that the mark has been abandoned. I would keep track of your correspondence with Skyview, and of course be prepared to escalate should you find out that the counterfeit wine exists in reality, as opposed to just in the form of a website listing.

Good to hear that you may be back selling Gan Eden in the near future.

Craig - I think you may be seeing ghosts here... Below is what I received from Gary Wartels -proprietor of Skyview. I suggest you contact him directly: gary [at] skyviewwines [dot] com

*********I am very easy to get ahold of by email and phone. It is possible that he was sending emails to our general email box, which is not always elevated to me.

There is some paranoid thinking going on here. The wine has been removed several times from my site, and would love to get it off permanently. It continues to reappear on my web site because the company I use to host my web site has an old wine called "Gan Eden" in their data base that is matching an SKU of an existing item in my inventory that is not Gan Eden. In other words, it is a mismatched item. This is the only reason it is still there.

It is not a phantom wine on my web site that Skyview is trying to steal, whatever that might mean.

I look forward to seeing the Gan Eden in the market and hope he will reconsider his mistaken opinion about Skyview.

I did not contact the general email, but perhaps this explanation promotes my rethinking the issue. I never received any response, in any case, but at least the explanation of the mixed up SKUs sounds plausible.

Craig Winchell wrote:I did not contact the general email, but perhaps this explanation promotes my rethinking the issue. I never received any response, in any case, but at least the explanation of the mixed up SKUs sounds plausible.

I can tell you from experience that although Skyview is one of my favorite wine sellers and I buy quite a bit from them, they're not that great at responding to e-mails and I frequently need to call to get a response. I certainly hope you reconsider as they'll probably resell with the smallest markup and they're always a pleasure to do business with.

I could not, in any case, sell directly to Skyview (as far as I know). I would supply a distributor who would then sell to retailers. So there would have been a contractual agreement between our entity and our distributorship of choice that selling to skyview would be grounds for termination of our distribution agreement. By the same token, if we didn't have such a stipulation in our distribution agreement, our entity still would not see any advantage to their smallest markup, except the possibility of greater sales volume, and since we would not do business directly with them, the pleasure of doing business with them would not be ours.

I should also say that with 250 or so cases of each wine, we wouldn't in any event require the expanded sales volume that you imply could be had through Skyview, although at the 10,000-20,000 case level, volume retailers could come in quite handy.

All of this is very interesting. The fact that I emailed Gary a demand letter directly and never received a response, however, is curious. That is the only implausible part of his response to Yossie.

That' very sweet of you, Maurie. I must say, if this ever comes to fruition, it will be good to be back in a primary winery role. My last primary role was not in winemaking but in BBQ,as owner/pitmaster. As much fun as that was, the wine business is even better.